The Passing Scene: July-August 1997

By Jonathan Landaw

As mentioned at the conclusion of my previous column, I shall be visiting several European FPMT centers from mid-September through early November of this year. This trip is an exciting prospect for me in large part because it will be my first time back to Europe in over eight years. When I departed from Schiphol Airport near Amsterdam in 1989 with my wife and two-year-old daughter and headed to Vajrapani Institute in California, it was impossible for me to conceive that it would be eight years and two children later before I returned.

Now that plans for this long delayed return are acquiring something like a definite shape, becoming more concrete and less dreamlike by the day, I find that my mind is running in two opposite directions at once. I am both anticipating what lies before me and remembering what happened during past visits. In my headlong flight from the reality of the present moment into the mists of a projected future and selectively remembered past, I seem to be trying my best to disregard Ram Dass’ advice: “Be Here Now.”

Instead, my mottoes have become “Be There Soon,” as when imagining which friend will accompany me to which restaurant in which city, and “Was There Before,” as when reliving in my memory some cherished meeting from many years ago. It does not matter how often I remind myself that these two – the imagined future and the remembered past – are equally unreal! I still enjoy basking in their contemplation.

I remember, for example, my very first visit to England, in 1969. I found it extraordinary that everyone sounded as if they had just stepped out of one of those old British movies I loved to watch on TV as a kid. And when I first rode on the Underground, it was an epiphany to discover that “Sloane Square and South Kensington Station” – which up to that moment had been nothing more than a catchy phrase in a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song – were actual places.

On a somewhat different cultural level was my visit to Stratford-upon-Avon. This took place a number of years before I first went to India, so I did not yet have a working knowledge of what it meant to “go on a pilgrimage.” But when I entered Trinity Church and stood before Shakespeare’s resting place, I was filled with an emotion I would only feel again when paying homage at the various Buddhist pilgrimage sites. Here, after all, was the writer whose words had provided me with dharma before I met the Dharma. (Less than a year ago, when I related this experience to a Shakespearean authority and drama teacher, she told me that I paid homage at the wrong site! The plays I so much admire were not written by that Stratford imposter, she said, but by the Earl of Oxford. I had heard this theory before, but passed it off as nothing more than the product of typically British eccentricity. Now it was being put forth by a someone I could not so easily dismiss. It makes me wonder if I would feel the same reverence were I to visit Trinity Church again.)

One last memory to share. This occurred in a small French town not far from Geneva. I was traveling with a friend and his young nephew and, by this time, I had already been to India. As part of what I laughingly refer to as my Dharma practice, I was in the habit of making three prostrations towards the East every evening and three more upon waking. On this particular morning it so happened that the nephew’s bed was to the east of the one space big enough for me to perform my ritual. As I was concluding my prostrations, the nephew opened his eyes and said sleepily, “That’s very nice, Jon, but a simple ‘good morning’ would do.”

Post script. I just returned from attending four days of teachings by His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Los Angeles. During one of the question-and-answer sessions, he addressed the topic of my last column, the difference between guilt and regret, and I thought to share a few of his remarks with you here. His Holiness said that the Tibetan language did not have a word that conveys what we seem to mean by “guilt,” with its connotations of hopelessness, and that such a despairing, negative emotion was completely useless. He then offered a way of distinguishing between such guilt and the much more efficacious regret: the former traps us in the past while the latter, motivating us to refrain from recommitting these actions we now recognize as destructive, is oriented towards the future.

As for my own dream impermanent future, I hope to see many of you in Europe soon. Cheers!

Without understanding how your inner nature evolves, how can you possibly discover eternal happiness? Where is eternal happiness? It’s not in the sky or in the jungle; you won’t find it in the air or under the ground. Everlasting happiness is within you, within your psyche, your consciousness, your mind. That’s why it’s important that you investigate the nature of your own mind.